MUCH more in keeping with her Oscar-winning short film Wasp than the ecstatically (over-) praised Red Road, Andrea Arnold's second feature, Fish Tank (****), confirms her status as one of the best new British directors around.
Freed from the tricksy narrative strictures of her debut, it also suggests she's much more comfortable working from her own material. Indeed, the film is brimming with so much confidence and life, it even avoids succumbing to some of the hokier secon
d-half plot developments that keep threatening to transform it into yet another trawl through the conventions of social-realist miserabilism.
Set on a rough-and-tumble council estate, it's the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a foul-mouthed 15-year-old who has been kicked out of school for undisclosed reasons. Having recently fallen out with her best friend, she's practically a pariah figure on the estate, shunned by the other girls her age and quick to dish out the odd head-butt should circumstances deem it necessary. Her home life isn't much better. Her mother (Kierston Wareing) seems barely older than her – and barely more mature, the kind of person for whom kids (Mia also has a little sister) are an inconvenient reminder of adult responsibilities she's nowhere near ready to embrace.
Mia finds solace from all this in dancing. With an abandoned, easy-to-break-into tower-block flat on hand to act as a de facto studio, she works out hip-hop dance moves, building routines and chugging cider in between, like some kitchen-sink version of Step Up. Arnold plays with the conventions of those sorts of believe-in-yourself dance movie dramas here, giving Mia a goal to work towards in the form of a dance audition that she spies an advert for in the local shop (which should perhaps be the first clue that this audition might not be for a legit gig), but her real focus is the effect the new man in her mum's life begins having on Mia. This is Connor (Michael Fassbender) – and immediately we get the sense that he's different from her mum's other boyfriends. Kind, talkative, supportive, good-looking, he takes a paternal interest in Mia that, from the gradual way she begins to let her guard down around him, suggests it might be the first moment in her life that an adult has taken the time to take care of her. Both Fassbender and newcomer Jarvis are fantastic here, and Arnold has such an astute understanding of the way people interact with each other it never feels as if we're being manipulated into feeling a specific way about either of them, even when a slightly over-affectionate bit of horsing around on Connor's part early on leaves you feeling uneasy about where this might go.
Somewhat depressingly, the film does go exactly where you expect it to, with transgressions and character revelations you can see coming a mile off. That's a minor quibble, though. Because Mia is such a fully formed, complex character, and because Arnold gives her scenes of often staggering beauty that nevertheless remain true to the film's surroundings, we're always in the moment with her. Stunning stuff.
Like Arnold, Australian animator Adam Elliot already has an Oscar under his belt for his short film Harvie Krumpet, and, also like Arnold, he makes good on that promise with his first feature,
Mary and Max (****), a funny, sweetly-subversive, stop-motion animation film for adults about an epistolary relationship between an awkward Australian schoolgirl called Mary (voiced by Toni Collette) and an obese, fortysomething New Yorker called Max (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Max has Asperger syndrome, which both helps their friendship to develop (her adolescent directness finding a mirror in his literal approach to life), and causes all sorts of problems as her naïvete triggers panic attacks in Max. What follows, though, is a beautifully observed portrait of friendship that niftily avoids the cutesy, sentimental traps films about these kinds of relationships often have. Full of wonky cityscapes and misshapen characters, its animation is gorgeous too, giving the film a lovely tactile, handcrafted feel.
You might expect
Moon (****) to have a bit of a handcrafted feel too, considering it's a sci-fi film done on a relatively minor budget, but promo director Duncan Jones works wonders with limited resources to create a sleek, oppressively sterile environment that harks back to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Set in a future where the fuel crisis has been solved by harvesting clean energy from the surface of the Moon, Jones's film uses its retro look to symbolise the way dark secrets can be buried beneath feel-good corporate spin when large profits are involved.
That theme gradually emerges in the story of Sam (Sam Rockwell), a lone astronaut nearing the end of a three-year contract tending the Earth's lunar mining outpost. Due to be sent back home and reunited with his wife and child, little inconsistencies and possible hallucinations cause him to start questioning his mental state – until an accident results in him discovering another presence who looks a lot like the original mission commander. To say much more risks ruining it, suffice it to say that, while there are unavoidable shades of 2001, Solaris and Blade Runner here, Jones and Rockwell – on fine, understated form – mine the scenario for all its worth to create an enjoyably provocative, low-key sci-fi film fuelled by ideas.
• You can find all of Alistair Harkness's Film Festival reviews online at
www.scotsman.com/artsblog. For festival listings, visit
www.edfilmfest.org.uk